Mood:
energeticTopic: big media
What can you say about ol' Monky eh?
There he was back in the day slumming it at Ursula College residential hall at ANU in the mid 80ies, like a barely concealed ASIO recruiting officer.
2 doors down from Burgmann College were KR Rudd was holed up some 5 years earlier.
Monky had a reputation amongst what Sister Scholastica (RIP) referred to as the elite: One a maths professor today, another a uni medal winner destined for Macquarie Bank, another who got more HDs than credits or distinctions. And this humble cynic - even at that age. I spent too much time envying Rodney Day listed as world record holder of Pengo arcade game in Wikipedia, earnd in the Ursula common room.
Back in the day when it was a religious Catholic institution. And I confess I ought not to have stolen the bottle of alter (!) wine and am just about a teetotal these days.
We had another name for ourselves - The Sloth Club. Which was so not true - all ambitious and quite hard working in private. But in the common room to join our 'club' there was only one rule - you didn't care if you were in our club! Suitable social apathy was the evidence required of a strong identity and self confidence that eschewed vain double talk.
Hence Monky was never going to cut it. And now we read his prose yesterday in The Australian dated 4 January 2011 attacking Assange as literally Daniel Ellsberg endorses Assange. WTF? Monky tries to turn that endorsement around while ignoring the revelations on the Iraq war count, the Right to Know agenda, the effective rescue of the relevance of the 4th estate from their own craven compromises with Big Govt/Big Corp Donors, peace dividend from what Gandhi calls the role of 'openness' in his profound 10 principles of non violence. And so on.
Monky hasn't changed - short of stature and short of principled prose. No one doubts the Big Media aka conservative press will both exploit wikileaks and proceed to their 'little murder' of the source being Assange and wikileaks. The 5th estate well know the deconstruction. But it won't work.
For the same reason gold Walkley winner Laurie Oakes staunchly defends the role of wikileaks in boosting the public's right to know, so Monk has only made an intellectual and moral fool of himself - again.
